Party at the End of the Rainbow is a raw and creatively written memoir that sweeps readers into the tumultuous world of the late 1960s and early 1970s, vividly narrating the rebellious counterculture movement through the eyes of its participants.Why was this an important book for you to write?

The voices of my generation are dying out and we now live in an age that seems to be sliding back into the madness we rebelled against in the 1960s. Most of us didn’t start out as rebels. No, we were led to question the hypocritical morality and the self-serving politics that grated on our nerves at that time. Revisiting those forgotten times with fresh eyes should re-energize today’s youth to continue the fight for truth and justice.  

What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?

Human beings of every era are capable of standing up to adversity to strive for a better, more just society. We try, but we often have hypocritical blind spots when it comes to meeting our individual needs. Thus the equality touted in the American Revolution could ignore or explain away the continuation of slavery, and we are still dealing with the effects of that today. History is the story of unfinished business explained away. I try to portray people as complex entities rather than one-dimensional characters, and show them as they appear to themselves as well as to those they interact with. None of us are all good or all bad in our own mind. We feel justified in what we do, and are often blind to the way we condemn others for the same behavior that have done.

What was the most challenging part of writing your memoir, and what was the most rewarding?

The most challenging part for me is organizing my memories into a chronological order. Therefore I spend time in reverie; looking back at the remembered snippets and meditating on them, which enables me relive the experience. They expand into a larger sharper and logical focus, almost a movie with forgotten scenes and events coming to mind. If there are letters or articles, or feedback from others still around, they can help me to put things in context.

The most rewarding for me is when I manage to put the mined events onto the page in a coherent way. I strive for accuracy, even if it puts the then me, as the main protagonist, in a less than flattering light, rather than create a revisionist history.

What do you hope is one thing readers take away from your story?

I hope they come to recognize the essential goodness in human nature and to see something of themselves in my characters. I want to help them taste the experiences my characters lived through and imagine how they would react in similar circumstances. I’d like them to question their values and the social and sexual mores of their own time. Are they really their own, or are they simply parroting what they have been taught by authorities. We all need to search our heart and examine our conscience, as Mark Twain’s Huck Finn did when he wrestled with whether to help his black friend Jim escape slavery or follow the morality that he’d been taught and turn him in. That moral quandary is not too remote from our own time.

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